Coolers are routinely used for transporting goods from one location to another. These coolers may have many compartments to store goods such as beverages, frozen/cooked food, and other items. In addition, these coolers may include dry ice/ice, heat sources, etc., for keeping the items in each compartment at a different temperature.
In some of these designs, one compartment of the cooler may be insulated from others. Insulation between compartments keeps heat/refrigeration confined to a small space, thereby allowing some of the compartments to keep goods warm and other compartments to cool them down. For instance, if ice is placed in one of the compartments of the cooler, the insulated walls of the cooler would allow the cooling effect of and any moisture generated from the ice to be confined to the single compartment. Thus, food/other items placed in adjacent compartments would be protected from the cooler temperatures and higher moisture content of the ice cold compartment. This scenario would be advantageous in situations where, for instance, dry food (e.g., cookies, chips, peanuts, etc) would spoil if placed in prolonged contact with moisture. To provide this insulation, walls between adjacent compartments may be coated with materials such as cloth and/or thermal packs, among other things.
Similarly, in other cooler designs, the walls separating adjacent compartments may be conductive (e.g., by being made out of a conductive material like metal, etc.), thereby allowing heat/refrigeration to pass readily from one compartment to another. With this configuration, a temperature gradient can be created between adjacent compartments. Using the earlier example of ice placed in one of the compartments, a conductive wall between the compartment with ice and an adjacent one may result in the adjacent compartment maintaining a temperature that is cooler than room temperature but at the same time warmer than the ice cold compartment (assuming, of course, that diffusion takes a certain amount of time to equilibrate the temperatures of the two compartments). In addition, moisture may be blocked from entering the adjacent compartment, thereby resulting in cooler with a cool, dry compartment and an ice cold, wet compartment.
If dry ice is used to cool any of the compartments in a multicompartment cooler, moisture generation is not an issue; however, the manipulation of temperature gradients between compartments may be controlled by the use of insulating and conductive barriers between compartments as discussed above. The use of thermal insulators/conductors between compartments provides only a crude level of control for maintaining a temperature differential between compartments.
In addition, conventional coolers are purchased as single size coolers, meaning that they can be used only in one size. Thus, in situations where only a small number of goods are to be transported in the cooler, a large cooler will have a significant amount of unfilled space. Similarly, in situations where a large number of goods are to be transported in the cooler, a smaller cooler will not suffice, thus resulting in the need for use of multiple coolers.